Under President Trump’s crackdown on immigrants, hundreds more may be sent back to Cambodia this year. The adjustment is jarring.
I’m working on a couple of new songs this weekend in collaboration with some colleagues and students. One, about a Cambodian refugee who moved to Minnesota, seems particularly timely with the headlines about recent mass deportation of Cambodian-Americans. This semester, reading and learning more about Cambodian history and working closely with a couple Cambodian-American students in class, as well as an undergrad whose family is from Laos, it’s become important to expand my knowledge of southeast Asia and different countries’ similarities and differences to Vietnam. Living in Providence, RI, especially, the community of southeast Asian refugees is an easy group to ignore at a school like Brown, but is an important part of Rhode Island.
